AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS9/10 6 years ago
[8.6/10] Detroit is a harrowing movie. It’s supposed to be. There is nothing sugarcoated or tempered about the horrific abuses it puts on display. Instead, it explores the causes, comission, and perpetuation of those abuses in turn, with only the slightest hints of hope to peak in around the edges.
That’s not to say that Detroit is anything less than artistic in its depiction of these abuses. There’s few showy flourishes, as the film matches the faux-documentary, in the thick of the action atmosphere and visual perspective that were on display in director Kathryn Bigelow’s prior efforts like Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker. But that is an artistry all its own. The most impressive technical achievement of Detroit is that, for better or worse, it makes you feel like you’re there, in the thick of such horrid acts, both victim and perpetrator and complicit observer all at once.
That is, understandably, too much for some to bear. The film has an interesting tripartite structure, not wholly dissimilar from that of Zero Dark Thirty. But rather than three distinct phases, each with its own goal and tenor, Detroit is more like a dizzying inhale, an eternity of holding one’s breath, followed by a painful exhale.
The film starts by dotting around the titular American city, as tensions build, riots erupt, and the tumult of the culmination of years of abuse and segregation touches the lives of figures from across Detroit. The opening act traces the roots of this conflict, the way its tendrils spread out and began to impact so many people and so many facets of their lives, from a hopeful singer to a racist cop to a security guard working two jobs and just trying to get by, until their paths cross in horrific tones.
It’s then that Detroit becomes hard to endure. The central event of the film is the real life terrorizing by policeman and other law enforcement authorities of a dozen individuals, all young black men (save for two young white women damned by the cops for daring to consort with them), that involved countless incidents of brutal beatings, psychological abuse, and out-and-out murder.
The film spares nothing in depicting these events. It gives the viewer no respite from the horror, no discretion shots to couch what’s happening more gently or palatably, no cuts away to save the audience from having to stand witness to these horrors. That is by design, intended to shock the conscience and see the pain and unforgivable cruelty inflicted with no ability to turn away or pretend these events were somehow gentler or less horrible than they were.
But that frankness in depiction is at times, too much. Detroit is not a pleasant film, nor one for the faint of heart. It’s easy to watch the film’s extended middle section, which hardly leaves one location or skips and jumps in time, and think it the social justice equivalent of Hostel, or recall the South Park kids’ commentary on The Passion of the Christ -- “That wasn’t a movie, that was a snuff film.”
And yet, it’s hard to call Detroit indulgent. It may be hard to watch, but it never feels like its reveling in this horror, exploiting it the way a gore movie might or fetishizing it for other purposes. Instead, the cinema verite style of the picture is both non-judgmental, making the camera a detached observer, and yet utterly condemning of what it displays, making the statement that “this is how things really are, and you cannot run from them, ignore them, or pretend they aren’t there.”
On the other hand, the film is not merely content to say “this exists.” While straightforward in its dialogue and script, it explores complexities beyond simply the fact that there were abuses by policeman against black communities. It explores the people who could have helped, but who abdicated their responsibilities lest they be caught in the same mess. It explores the intersection of gender, of military service, of respectability politics and so many other pieces of the “bloody heirloom” (as Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it) that are encapsulated by this one grisly event.
The film is also not content to make this a generalized evil, with unspecified victims. It dramatizes the impact of the brutality and murder at the Algiers Hotel through three characters, and how they’re affected by it.
The first is Dismukes, the security guard who sidles up to law enforcement in an attempt to slow the bleeding. Dismukes is played by John Boyega, who gives a reserved but powerhouse performance in the picture. Speaking few words, he is a man who believes in appeasement, in avoiding the avoidable and lessening the pain of the unavoidable, and yet clearly feels the weight of his silence and steadfastness beneath his stoic surface.
The second is Kraus (Will Poulter who, like the film, doesn’t shy away from the monstrousness of his character), the racist policeman who leads the “interrogation.” At times, Kraus feels too evil to be real, and yet he is the sort of down-to-earth, lived in sort of abuser, the one who justifies his actions to himself, who feels confident he can wriggle out of any noose, that he eventually becomes all too real.
And then there’s Larry, the lead singer of The Dramatics, a Motown-aspiring group of singers. Larry is the lamb led to the slaughter, a young man who has no part in even the thin justifications for the assault. He is an innocent, not just of these supposed crimes, but of the social order and system that allows them. And he has the clearest arc in the film.
That arc emerges in the film’s third act, which explores the aftermath of the murder and brutality, in the community and for those involved. Kraus is called to answer for his actions, but Dismukes is accused alongside him. And the film treats their exoneration as the mixed blessing it is, on the one side, the sparing of a good man, and on the other, the escape of an evil one. When Kraus smirks and thanks Dismukes like a compatriot after he’s set free, Dismukes runs outside and vomits. While more understated that Larry’s,, Dismukes’s emotional journey is clear as well, one that makes him realize just what he’s been appeasing, and what he’s been a part of, in the same of trying to do the best he could for himself, his loved ones, and those who share his burdens.
Larry was not a part of that, or at least not cognizant of it, until made to face these horrors. The film suggests that the things done to him, the things he was forced to witness, changed Larry. No longer could he sing with the passion and abandon that fueled his dream. Instead, the only thing left within him were the prayers he sang out with a mortal threat standing behind him. When he walked into that hotel, he was a young man hoping to sign his heart out for the world, and when he walked out, he became a changed man, who could only sing for the blessings and hopes and prayers for the divine.
How you feel about Detroit will no doubt be influenced by whether it has the power to change you. If you are, like some in the film, naive or unknowing of the horrid depths of these sorts of abuses, you may walk out changed as well, made witness to them and unable to deny them. If you are, like me, someone who acknowledges these unforgivable trespasses but will likely never have to experience them, the film is a stark reminder of the horrors that you cannot elide in the theater, but never face outside it, and a call to action. And if you are someone who instead has to face those threats, those anxieties, and the sharpest edges of our society on a daily basis, then the film can only serve as a reminder of what already cannot be forgotten.
But the film has power. It gains that power from the way it personalizes these events, and from the broader societal scope it takes along the way, but also from its unflinching view of its central horror. How we take that horror, how we respond to it, says as much about who we are and the vantage point from which we see it, as anything in the film itself, and that is powerful too.
